Think outside the lines

Thousands of dollars in deficit, fixed costs closing in from all sides, nowhere else to cut but personnel — is this what it’s going to take to implement regionalization?

If so, then this budget cloud has at least one silver lining.

Rutland selectmen this week tossed around the idea of regionalizing their police chief, intending it as a cost-saving measure. That’s probably the only way a town will ever consider regionalizing such a high-profile position, and giving up the level of control that selectmen and Town Meeting can exert over one of the town’s most important departments. It’s one thing to regionalize public safety dispatch — among agencies within town, and even (as Rutland does) across town lines. But regionalizing the police chief simply sounds strange — like regionalizing the Planning Board, or regionalizing the town clerk. Or regionalizing … the superintendent of schools?

Somehow, towns figured out more than 50 years ago that a regional district makes economic and programmatic sense for education: Wachusett students have more opportunities and taxpayers get more value for their dollar in a five-town district than they would at a modern Rutland High School or from a Paxton School Department. The tradeoff, as the annual fight over budgets amply demonstrates, is a reduction in selectmen’s, finance committees’ and town meetings’ control over education finance. But that’s a comparatively small price to pay.

Whether this model makes sense for public safety is for chiefs, selectmen and voters to decide. As in the example of regional schools, any merger or personnel sharing across town lines has to deliver better service, not just cost savings.

Inertia stands against any change to the onetown, one-chief model of public safety in Central Massachusetts, but the fact that change will be controversial, complicated and difficult shouldn’t make town leaders — including the chiefs themselves — dismiss it out of hand. The cost of doing nothing is written in red ink on the town budget every year; taxpayers deserve an honest appraisal of the alternative.